Sorry I haven't been accomplishing very much in MCPE lately. I've been tootling around with a few things here and there, but nothing huge or significant. Outside of MCPE has been taking a bit more of my attention, the main thing being setting up an RPG campaign (something I haven't done in many years).
At any rate, here's what I'm working on, and will hopefully have updates to show you of:
Pumpkin/melon auto-farm. This is one of those tasks I'm just having a hard time making myself work on. *shrug*
A road leading back to Spawn base. The path crosses several cliffs leading up to rivers, so each of these will need it's own bridge, which is time consuming. Also planning out where to lay the road through the Extreme Hills.
I've decided to go ahead and build a mass auto-smelter.
I've used several different smelters thoughout this build in Realms, but usually I just pile the goods into a large input chest, and pull them out into a large output chest or sorter, and let it take its time. I've never rushed it. The advantage to this is that I can use lava as the fuel. With a mass auto-smelter, using lava is a waste of resources - you're spreading the load out across multiple furnaces so that each furnace is actually only doing a few items at most. Most of your lava would be wasted, unless you are smelting a truly *MASSIVE* load of items. Most of the mass autosmelter designs I've seen, even coal is a waste. Good thing this game doesn't include air pollution, right?
But I've realized I've got access to a pretty good fuel, and it's not hard to build up a large enough stash of this fuel that I can stuff all the hoppers full of it, and only top it off occasionally. Mushroom blocks. Each shroom block does 1.5 smelts, iirc. So it's not wasting very much at all if a shroom block only gets used to smelt one item. And now that I've got a librarian who sells Silk Touch books, it's easy to enchant items to collect these blocks.
My current furnace is set up so that I can switch on or off the hopper that drains it out, so if I'm only doing a few items I can collect them myself and get the XP. Flipping a switch turns on the drain for larger jobs so I don't need to babysit the furnace. Well, I've built this auto-smelter so that it hangs off the back of my current furnace, and flipping the switch changes the feed from the front manual furnace to the 8 auto-smelters hidden behind it. And they all feed right back into the same output chest in the front. I haven't built this in Realms yet, just in creative. (And I've also figured out that when planning redstone circuits, redstone lamps make good planning blocks. You can tell when a block is powered and when it isn't. )
Greetings y'all. Finally finished off the auto-smelter machine.
Okay, here is the sketch plan of the Auto-smelter:
Manual furnace emptying:
Auto-smelter:
So here is the view once the machine itself is covered up. The Iron trapdoor covers up the furnace when it's in auto-smelter mode. I'm working on filling up all of the fuel hoppers and chests with Mushroom Blocks. The manual furnace uses brown mushrooms, the auto-smelter uses red. The chests and hoppers will all be split 50/50 between the two types, so that I'll be able to see in the front chest when one of the types starts running low.
The door leads back into the machine for maintenance purposes.
Had to make one change to the auto-smelter: the repeater at the end next to the comparator was introducing a delay that was allowing items to stack up in the last hopper. Had to swap it out for two blocks with a redstone dust, arranged like so:
Had an idea for a project to do while watching BluJay's latest video:
A protected trading village where the villagers walk free, but are name-tagged with unique names so that you have to seek out the person you want to trade with. I'm not sure if this is too much of a stretch, but putting the village in the Nether would be a hoot. Don't have to worry about zombie rushes there, I don't think. Just have to make sure it's protected from Ghast blasts and I think it should be fairly safe.
Mind you - the Nether in my Realms is particularly insane. Ghasts all over the place. Building the foundations of the village will be very difficult. I'll have to give it some thought.
Ah, drat. I just figured out why it wouldn't work, why I haven't seen anyone do it before. The definition of a village requires visibility to the sky, and there is none of that in the Nether. Well phooey. Guess I'll have to do it in the overworld after all. I'll give the whole concept some thought, find a good place to put it, etc.
Also, I realized I'd forgotten to post the pics of the bridge I built for the road leading back to Spawn:
I don't claim it's a masterpiece or anything, but I think it's got a decent style to it.
Ta for now, folks!
PS - If any of you came here from BluJay's link on his video- welcome! I hope you can make it through my meandering posts and find something you like.
I love the idea of an open trading village! Would be a challenge to light it up well enough to avoid spawning hostile mobs, but probably doable! Great idea TMO!
One trick to doing it so it's usable would be to divide the village up into compounds of about 10-12 villagers each. The villagers wouldn't be able to move between them, but the player could. That way it wouldn't be impossible for the player to find the villager they were after once they know what compound to look in.
Another issue would be a way of jettisoning useless villagers somehow, without harming the player's popularity score.
Very little MCPE playing in the last week - lots of other stuff going on. This next week might be the same, sorry. I've decided on the Villager Trading Compound location - an abandoned village where I'd started to build an iron farm, but gave up when I realized all of the villagers were gone. It's already walled in and lit up. I've started tearing down all the buildings and the attempted iron farm to make space for the new compound.
It might be a bit before the next significant update, just an fyi.
v1.0.9 downloaded today. I haven't looked at the bug fix report yet. AFK fish farms still don't work, and the Greek texture pack is actually tempting. I've been fishing, trading and mob killing to try and enchant a diamond shovel for terraforming the trading village.
Apparently v1.0.9 was nothing *but* the Greek texture pack. Oh well. I've been working on terraforming the old village where the new Villager Trading Compound will be located. Nothing much exciting there. Just digging out a large chunk of ground, filling in a river, ripping down hillsides, collecting dozens of ... horses? Yes, apparently this is in a biome that spawns horses. I've got at least a dozen of them in a corral now, all tamed. I'll need to figure out how to rate them so I can pick out the best of them. For added fun, I've moved one of them over into the Nether, so I can ride from location to location instead of walk like some common plebian.
But the only screenshot I have is of the storeroom for this project. It was originally supposed to be the collection point for the iron farm I tried to build here. It's located under the village's well.
4000 views should be some sort of milestone earning a large update with lots of pictures and progress. Too bad I'm #4000, and all I've got are these:
I'm flattening out a large area for the villager trading compound. The compound will be centered on the well, with avenues and buildings laid out around it. I haven't done much work yet on a building design, but I'm going to try for something with farms in it so the villagers can feed and breed themselves. And the players have to be able to access the buildings to reach the villagers for trading purposes as well.
My son was playing in Realms the other day, and I noticed that he was standing unmoving in the nether, and went to go see what was going on. When I got close, it froze on me. It's been 3 days now, and I still can't log back in. I'm hoping the next version update will resolve this issue. If not though, I'll be filing a bug with Mojang.
Any ways, that's why there's nothing new to report.
I'm not too worried about it. If I have to reset, I have to reset. But I didn't reset during the Blaze bug, I'll try not to over this if I can help it.
The kids are leaning towards a reset. I've filed a bug with Mojang on the issue, but if I don't hear back within a couple of days, I'll download the world and do a reset to a fresh world. If that happens I'll start a new thread.
Part of me doesn't mind, because one of the things I enjoy most is the exploration and the initial building and surviving.
I've managed to unfreeze us in the new version. There is something about that location that freezes us up. By repeatedly backing up as much as i could, shutting down the program after a freeze, reopening it and repeating, I was eventually able to get us out of the freeze zone. We're both now out of it and able to move around. However, going back to that area seems to freeze us again. I don't know if it's the horse, or the magma cube, or maybe a ghost block, or something else entirely. I'll have to play around and see.
How much progress have you made since the beginning of this realm?
Oh, I guess it depends on how you define progress. Do we have cities or towns built, or massive amounts of infrastructure? No. We haven't conquered the Nether, or been to the End. We don't have massive farms for every conceivable item. An expert player dedicating a fair amount of their play time could replicate what we've got within a couple of weeks, I'd imagine.
What we do have is a couple of fairly large bases, one castle building, and I've hollowed out a mountain and stripped an ocean monument down to the platform, and a reasonably large explored area.. Nothing irreplaceable.
Starting over did have its appeal though. I enjoy the beginning challenge, exploring, fighting for survival, doing what you can with few supplies. Once you make it past that and build up, you can't really get it back, because you always know you've got the other stuff to fall back on if you need it. You have to move on to new challenges. And staying focused on those goals can be difficult at times. New things catch your interest, and you run off to do them, and never quite get back to the old ones.
At any rate, today's update. I finally did something I've been needing to do since I moved my storage system to the bottom of the base - I've moved my enchanting table. Part of what took so long was I wanted to have some way of organizing my magic books there too, and I didn't have a design for that. So I dug out an area and played around with flooring and dirt blocks and came up with this:
For fun and giggles, I installed a secret door in my Enchanting Library. "Put the candle ... back!" I think I'll move my brewing stand in there and set up some sort of potion lab. I know very little about potion brewing. The only ones I've made so far have been to cure zombie villagers.
I did some more mining last night - I'm almost out of diamonds. I've only got 9 left. On the plus side, I mostly have a *very* nice set of armor. I've also been doing a lot of fishing, hoping to get some Mending books. I've tried the AFK fish farms, and they still don't seem to work. *grump*
Sorry I haven't been accomplishing very much in MCPE lately. I've been tootling around with a few things here and there, but nothing huge or significant. Outside of MCPE has been taking a bit more of my attention, the main thing being setting up an RPG campaign (something I haven't done in many years).
At any rate, here's what I'm working on, and will hopefully have updates to show you of:
I've used several different smelters thoughout this build in Realms, but usually I just pile the goods into a large input chest, and pull them out into a large output chest or sorter, and let it take its time. I've never rushed it. The advantage to this is that I can use lava as the fuel. With a mass auto-smelter, using lava is a waste of resources - you're spreading the load out across multiple furnaces so that each furnace is actually only doing a few items at most. Most of your lava would be wasted, unless you are smelting a truly *MASSIVE* load of items. Most of the mass autosmelter designs I've seen, even coal is a waste. Good thing this game doesn't include air pollution, right?
But I've realized I've got access to a pretty good fuel, and it's not hard to build up a large enough stash of this fuel that I can stuff all the hoppers full of it, and only top it off occasionally. Mushroom blocks. Each shroom block does 1.5 smelts, iirc. So it's not wasting very much at all if a shroom block only gets used to smelt one item. And now that I've got a librarian who sells Silk Touch books, it's easy to enchant items to collect these blocks.
My current furnace is set up so that I can switch on or off the hopper that drains it out, so if I'm only doing a few items I can collect them myself and get the XP. Flipping a switch turns on the drain for larger jobs so I don't need to babysit the furnace. Well, I've built this auto-smelter so that it hangs off the back of my current furnace, and flipping the switch changes the feed from the front manual furnace to the 8 auto-smelters hidden behind it. And they all feed right back into the same output chest in the front. I haven't built this in Realms yet, just in creative. (And I've also figured out that when planning redstone circuits, redstone lamps make good planning blocks. You can tell when a block is powered and when it isn't. )
Pics of the whole thing within the week.
TMO's Realms Blog (v0.15+)
MCPE Survival Blog #2 - Rhageos (v0.11-0.12)
My MCPE Survival world Blog (v0.9-0.10)
MCPE Hardcore Blog (v0.10)
Greetings y'all. Finally finished off the auto-smelter machine.
Okay, here is the sketch plan of the Auto-smelter:
Manual furnace emptying:
Auto-smelter:
So here is the view once the machine itself is covered up. The Iron trapdoor covers up the furnace when it's in auto-smelter mode. I'm working on filling up all of the fuel hoppers and chests with Mushroom Blocks. The manual furnace uses brown mushrooms, the auto-smelter uses red. The chests and hoppers will all be split 50/50 between the two types, so that I'll be able to see in the front chest when one of the types starts running low.
The door leads back into the machine for maintenance purposes.
Manual Emptying:
Auto-smelter:
TMO's Realms Blog (v0.15+)
MCPE Survival Blog #2 - Rhageos (v0.11-0.12)
My MCPE Survival world Blog (v0.9-0.10)
MCPE Hardcore Blog (v0.10)
Had to make one change to the auto-smelter: the repeater at the end next to the comparator was introducing a delay that was allowing items to stack up in the last hopper. Had to swap it out for two blocks with a redstone dust, arranged like so:
TMO's Realms Blog (v0.15+)
MCPE Survival Blog #2 - Rhageos (v0.11-0.12)
My MCPE Survival world Blog (v0.9-0.10)
MCPE Hardcore Blog (v0.10)
Had an idea for a project to do while watching BluJay's latest video:
A protected trading village where the villagers walk free, but are name-tagged with unique names so that you have to seek out the person you want to trade with. I'm not sure if this is too much of a stretch, but putting the village in the Nether would be a hoot. Don't have to worry about zombie rushes there, I don't think. Just have to make sure it's protected from Ghast blasts and I think it should be fairly safe.
Mind you - the Nether in my Realms is particularly insane. Ghasts all over the place. Building the foundations of the village will be very difficult. I'll have to give it some thought.
Ah, drat. I just figured out why it wouldn't work, why I haven't seen anyone do it before. The definition of a village requires visibility to the sky, and there is none of that in the Nether. Well phooey. Guess I'll have to do it in the overworld after all. I'll give the whole concept some thought, find a good place to put it, etc.
Also, I realized I'd forgotten to post the pics of the bridge I built for the road leading back to Spawn:
I don't claim it's a masterpiece or anything, but I think it's got a decent style to it.
Ta for now, folks!
PS - If any of you came here from BluJay's link on his video- welcome! I hope you can make it through my meandering posts and find something you like.
TMO's Realms Blog (v0.15+)
MCPE Survival Blog #2 - Rhageos (v0.11-0.12)
My MCPE Survival world Blog (v0.9-0.10)
MCPE Hardcore Blog (v0.10)
I love the idea of an open trading village! Would be a challenge to light it up well enough to avoid spawning hostile mobs, but probably doable! Great idea TMO!
Find me on YouTube
Find me on Twitter
One trick to doing it so it's usable would be to divide the village up into compounds of about 10-12 villagers each. The villagers wouldn't be able to move between them, but the player could. That way it wouldn't be impossible for the player to find the villager they were after once they know what compound to look in.
Another issue would be a way of jettisoning useless villagers somehow, without harming the player's popularity score.
TMO's Realms Blog (v0.15+)
MCPE Survival Blog #2 - Rhageos (v0.11-0.12)
My MCPE Survival world Blog (v0.9-0.10)
MCPE Hardcore Blog (v0.10)
Very little MCPE playing in the last week - lots of other stuff going on. This next week might be the same, sorry. I've decided on the Villager Trading Compound location - an abandoned village where I'd started to build an iron farm, but gave up when I realized all of the villagers were gone. It's already walled in and lit up. I've started tearing down all the buildings and the attempted iron farm to make space for the new compound.
It might be a bit before the next significant update, just an fyi.
TMO's Realms Blog (v0.15+)
MCPE Survival Blog #2 - Rhageos (v0.11-0.12)
My MCPE Survival world Blog (v0.9-0.10)
MCPE Hardcore Blog (v0.10)
Looking forward to seeing what you come up with!
Find me on YouTube
Find me on Twitter
I haven't come up with a real design yet, I'm still in the prep/what do I do now? phase. Here are a few screenshots:
These walls show mark the direction and distance to the outer edge of where I'm going to build.
TMO's Realms Blog (v0.15+)
MCPE Survival Blog #2 - Rhageos (v0.11-0.12)
My MCPE Survival world Blog (v0.9-0.10)
MCPE Hardcore Blog (v0.10)
v1.0.9 downloaded today. I haven't looked at the bug fix report yet. AFK fish farms still don't work, and the Greek texture pack is actually tempting. I've been fishing, trading and mob killing to try and enchant a diamond shovel for terraforming the trading village.
TMO's Realms Blog (v0.15+)
MCPE Survival Blog #2 - Rhageos (v0.11-0.12)
My MCPE Survival world Blog (v0.9-0.10)
MCPE Hardcore Blog (v0.10)
Apparently v1.0.9 was nothing *but* the Greek texture pack. Oh well. I've been working on terraforming the old village where the new Villager Trading Compound will be located. Nothing much exciting there. Just digging out a large chunk of ground, filling in a river, ripping down hillsides, collecting dozens of ... horses? Yes, apparently this is in a biome that spawns horses. I've got at least a dozen of them in a corral now, all tamed. I'll need to figure out how to rate them so I can pick out the best of them. For added fun, I've moved one of them over into the Nether, so I can ride from location to location instead of walk like some common plebian.
But the only screenshot I have is of the storeroom for this project. It was originally supposed to be the collection point for the iron farm I tried to build here. It's located under the village's well.
TMO's Realms Blog (v0.15+)
MCPE Survival Blog #2 - Rhageos (v0.11-0.12)
My MCPE Survival world Blog (v0.9-0.10)
MCPE Hardcore Blog (v0.10)
4000 views should be some sort of milestone earning a large update with lots of pictures and progress. Too bad I'm #4000, and all I've got are these:
I'm flattening out a large area for the villager trading compound. The compound will be centered on the well, with avenues and buildings laid out around it. I haven't done much work yet on a building design, but I'm going to try for something with farms in it so the villagers can feed and breed themselves. And the players have to be able to access the buildings to reach the villagers for trading purposes as well.
TMO's Realms Blog (v0.15+)
MCPE Survival Blog #2 - Rhageos (v0.11-0.12)
My MCPE Survival world Blog (v0.9-0.10)
MCPE Hardcore Blog (v0.10)
My son was playing in Realms the other day, and I noticed that he was standing unmoving in the nether, and went to go see what was going on. When I got close, it froze on me. It's been 3 days now, and I still can't log back in. I'm hoping the next version update will resolve this issue. If not though, I'll be filing a bug with Mojang.
Any ways, that's why there's nothing new to report.
TMO's Realms Blog (v0.15+)
MCPE Survival Blog #2 - Rhageos (v0.11-0.12)
My MCPE Survival world Blog (v0.9-0.10)
MCPE Hardcore Blog (v0.10)
WOW! That stinks! Hope you don't lose everything TMO!
Find me on YouTube
Find me on Twitter
I'm not too worried about it. If I have to reset, I have to reset. But I didn't reset during the Blaze bug, I'll try not to over this if I can help it.
TMO's Realms Blog (v0.15+)
MCPE Survival Blog #2 - Rhageos (v0.11-0.12)
My MCPE Survival world Blog (v0.9-0.10)
MCPE Hardcore Blog (v0.10)
The kids are leaning towards a reset. I've filed a bug with Mojang on the issue, but if I don't hear back within a couple of days, I'll download the world and do a reset to a fresh world. If that happens I'll start a new thread.
Part of me doesn't mind, because one of the things I enjoy most is the exploration and the initial building and surviving.
TMO's Realms Blog (v0.15+)
MCPE Survival Blog #2 - Rhageos (v0.11-0.12)
My MCPE Survival world Blog (v0.9-0.10)
MCPE Hardcore Blog (v0.10)
I've managed to unfreeze us in the new version. There is something about that location that freezes us up. By repeatedly backing up as much as i could, shutting down the program after a freeze, reopening it and repeating, I was eventually able to get us out of the freeze zone. We're both now out of it and able to move around. However, going back to that area seems to freeze us again. I don't know if it's the horse, or the magma cube, or maybe a ghost block, or something else entirely. I'll have to play around and see.
TMO's Realms Blog (v0.15+)
MCPE Survival Blog #2 - Rhageos (v0.11-0.12)
My MCPE Survival world Blog (v0.9-0.10)
MCPE Hardcore Blog (v0.10)
How much progress have you made since the beginning of this realm?
How much progress have you made since the beginning of this realm?
Oh, I guess it depends on how you define progress. Do we have cities or towns built, or massive amounts of infrastructure? No. We haven't conquered the Nether, or been to the End. We don't have massive farms for every conceivable item. An expert player dedicating a fair amount of their play time could replicate what we've got within a couple of weeks, I'd imagine.
What we do have is a couple of fairly large bases, one castle building, and I've hollowed out a mountain and stripped an ocean monument down to the platform, and a reasonably large explored area.. Nothing irreplaceable.
Starting over did have its appeal though. I enjoy the beginning challenge, exploring, fighting for survival, doing what you can with few supplies. Once you make it past that and build up, you can't really get it back, because you always know you've got the other stuff to fall back on if you need it. You have to move on to new challenges. And staying focused on those goals can be difficult at times. New things catch your interest, and you run off to do them, and never quite get back to the old ones.
At any rate, today's update. I finally did something I've been needing to do since I moved my storage system to the bottom of the base - I've moved my enchanting table. Part of what took so long was I wanted to have some way of organizing my magic books there too, and I didn't have a design for that. So I dug out an area and played around with flooring and dirt blocks and came up with this:
TMO's Realms Blog (v0.15+)
MCPE Survival Blog #2 - Rhageos (v0.11-0.12)
My MCPE Survival world Blog (v0.9-0.10)
MCPE Hardcore Blog (v0.10)
For fun and giggles, I installed a secret door in my Enchanting Library. "Put the candle ... back!" I think I'll move my brewing stand in there and set up some sort of potion lab. I know very little about potion brewing. The only ones I've made so far have been to cure zombie villagers.
I did some more mining last night - I'm almost out of diamonds. I've only got 9 left. On the plus side, I mostly have a *very* nice set of armor. I've also been doing a lot of fishing, hoping to get some Mending books. I've tried the AFK fish farms, and they still don't seem to work. *grump*
TMO's Realms Blog (v0.15+)
MCPE Survival Blog #2 - Rhageos (v0.11-0.12)
My MCPE Survival world Blog (v0.9-0.10)
MCPE Hardcore Blog (v0.10)